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Collecting the Imagination: The First Fifty Years of the Ransom Center (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series)

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Description

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin is without doubt one of the world’s preeminent institutions for the study of literature, photography, and the humanities. The Ransom Center is renowned for its remarkable collections of literary manuscripts, rare books, photographs, art, and film and performing arts materials. Founded in 1957 with a core collection of rare books, the Ransom Center has expanded its holdings at a phenomenal rate, in order that it now houses 36 million leaves of manuscripts, 1 million rare books, 5 million photographs, and one hundred thousand artworks. Among its most famous holdings are a Gutenberg Bible; the Helmut Gernsheim Collection, a major photohistorical archive that comprises the world’s first photograph (ca. 1826); the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library of Early English Literature; the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; the archive and costume collection of Robert De Niro; and the personal literary archives of hundreds of major twentieth-century writers, from Samuel Beckett and James Joyce to Tom Stoppard and Norman Mailer.

This volume celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Harry Ransom Center. Team of workers members describe the Center’s founding, the remarkable growth of its collections as a part of a thoughtful and deliberate acquisition plan, and its extensive outreach to scholars, students, and most of the people. They pay tribute to the leadership of Harry Ransom, who conceived the idea of a research center in the humanities that would be for the state of Texas what the Bibliothèque Nationale is for France. The authors also tell fascinating stories of how individual collections and archives were acquired, in addition to one of the vital controversies and myths that have arisen on account of the Ransom Center’s liberal spending and rapid growth. Photographs of treasures from the Ransom Center and key figures in its history round out this lovely and authoritative volume.

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